WhatsApp’s Privacy Blunder: How 3.5 Billion Phone Numbers Were Exposed in Epic Data Leak!
WhatsApp’s mass adoption makes it easy to find new contacts, but it’s also a paradise for data scrapers. Researchers extracted 3.5 billion phone numbers using WhatsApp’s contact discovery feature. If “contact discovery” sounds like a friendly feature, just remember, it’s also a shortcut to a global phone book!
Hot Take:
Turns out, WhatsApp’s “Add Contact” feature is the gift that keeps on giving—just not in the way anyone wanted. Who knew that the act of adding a friend could end up being a global game of “Guess Who?” with 3.5 billion participants? Time to rethink your profile pic, folks, because it might be starring in a data leak near you!
Key Points:
- Austrian researchers extracted 3.5 billion phone numbers from WhatsApp using a contact discovery trick.
- Profile photos and texts were accessible for 57% and 29% of users respectively.
- Meta fixed the issue by implementing stricter rate-limiting measures.
- This is potentially the largest data exposure ever documented.
- WhatsApp is considering a username feature to improve privacy.
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